Both effectively deny the identity of indiscernibles, the first by virtue of the different "hecceities" that two distinct individuals must have, and the second because no two reacting things can have the same spatial (or, I would add, temporal) relations.

The latter is what I had in mind when I suggested as an example of contextuality, "This object from one point of view, or at one time and place, is not the same as this object from another point of view, or at another time and place." — aletheist

Again, as already said, semiosis goes further. It defines indiscernability as a pragmatic issue - the principle of indifference that underlines probability theory.

So indiscernability is not ontic, but epistemic. If the Universe has a purpose, then that in itself creates a boundary, an event horizon, where it will cease to sweat the detail. It meets that purpose and then everything beyond that is a matter of generalised indifference.

So maths is hung up on radical openness. Counting seems something that extends to infinity because the very definiteness of any first step seems to already to guarantee the openness of that. And then the radicalness of that openness leads to a desperation to also produce a matching closure. Philosophy of maths ties itself into knots to discover global bounds on unbounded construction - the 2ns of already determinate degrees of freedom.

But semiosis already comes with the closure to match the openness. If there is openness due to their being a purpose, then there is a closeness in the way that also creates the possibility of its own satisfaction.

Thus at the level of 1ns, the continuum is neither an open or closed set. It is a clopen set - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clopen_set

Or as I said earlier, a scalefree situation like a fractal. If you are seeking either points or their contextual neighbourhoods, they exist with perfect evenness across every possible scale of being (and so, like a fractal, there is radical openness). And yet at the same time, the perfection of that evenness is a scale symmetry or the definiteness of actual closure. You can use a single number to capture the exact (symmetry broken) dimensionality of the resulting structure. The Cantor set for instance has an "angle" of ln(2)/ln(3) or ≈ 0.631.

Peirce's definition of "real" is that which has characters regardless of what anyone thinks about it. — aletheist

So then the actual only has character to the degree that reality has thought about it. That fits.

What materialists call the actual is only that which physical pan-semiosis has secured as some persisting mark of being.

If 3ns is real, it is real because it can't be wished away. Likewise the ultimate tychism of 1ns is real in the same fashion.

But 2ns is only real in that it is the emergent result of the other foundational reals - the actual causes of actual being. So it is not itself really real in being the product of pansemiotic "thought", or the universal growth of reasonableness. Matter is effete mind as they say. Or in other words, any material event could have been thought otherwise. Newtonian mechanics was always about inserting ourselves and our desires into reality. We want to discover the "hard facts" of atomistic events so as to then be able to rearrange the machinery of existence for our own convenience.

The first requires determinacy with respect to every general character, and thus - as he wrote elsewhere (see below) - can only be an ideal limit; while the second makes individuality a matter of reaction, and therefore existence. — aletheist

I already covered this where you first made your objections about my mention of an unresolved "tension".

If 3ns is the constrained totality, then 1ns and 2ns stand constrained by it as first, the 1ns of in fact unconstrained possibilty, and then second, the 2ns of now constrained or determinate possibility.

So actuality from this standpoint is simply regularity of spontaneity. Energy or fluctuation has become so ordered by global law or habit as to be fixed in its dimensionality and thus completely determinate and countable as a physical degree of freedom.

This is where we actually are in quantum cosmology. We can count the total number of physical degrees of freedom in the visible universe at its Heat Death - there are 10^122.

So in including energy in the physical picture closes it, turns the apparently open or infinite into a tale of the inherently finite.

This means the continuum is "grainy" under a quantum gravity "theory of everything" view of the Universe. But grainy doesn't mean definite or determinate discontinuity - as in the points of a line, or the pixels of an image. It means that the necessary duality in terms of the forces of integration and differentiation - the constraining generality of global 3ns and constructing actuality of local 2ns - are already present in germinative fashion in the vague potentiality of 1ns.

So again, 1ns is unconstrained possibility. 2ns is constrained possibility (local actual constructive freedom). And 3ns is the constraint of both kinds of possibility.

Another way to put it is that if generality and vagueness are real yet not actual, then the actual would be the not real. Or if the first two are the ideal limits, then actuality is the thus limited.

That sounds paradoxical but makes the point that actuality - as the 2ns of substantial events - is the emergent outcome of the two real causes of being, the material potential of 1ns and the formal constraint of 3ns. So actuality is not real in being merely an effect, not a cause.

Zalamea p23 highlights that points are the limits on actuality - and so actual actuality is an unreal possibility in being completely or Platonically ideal. Existence can approach but not reach the perfection of discontinuous actualisation that the principle of identity demands.

Indeed, the actual, the given, the present, the instant, are no more than ideal limits: limits of possibility neighbourhoods which contain those actuality marks, those points impossible to be drawn, those fleeting presents, those impalpable instants.

Zalamea also highlights the irreducible mutuality that is thus at the heart of spatiotemporal existence when he goes on to talk about Peirce foreshadowing a modern desire for possibilitia surgery techniques.

For me - coming at this from a more physical perspective where energy or action must be made properly part of any world geometry model - you can understand energy in terms of spatiotemporal curvature. So now we can understand the continuum - that blackboard that is already determinate in being definitely dimensional - in terms of its own more primal pre-geometry.

Briefly, you have the two things going on as a reaction. We start with the unboundedness of disconnected curvature - a roil of hot spacetime indeterminate fluctuation. A chaos of directions all erasing each other. That is, an infinity of scraps of hyperbolic curvature. Space as energetic action is buckled maximally at every point and so curves apart from itself to lack all actual connection. The only continuity is this sea of rupture. 2ns exists only as the reactions that are immediate hyperbolic divergence - fluctuation dyads that are breaking apart as soon they connect, leaving behind no history or memory, no 3ns of some context of continuity.

But in the very fact of chaotic or locally hyperbolic curvature, you then have the latent possibility of a constraint to flat and simply connected Euclidean space. If only 1ns could be cooled and its wild curvature could start to join up to share a common story - each point or rupture be flattened just enough for a history of ongoing relations to start to form. Ie: the birth of 3ns as now a telos. Euclidean flatness could become the thermal goal. If definite dimensionality begins to form - like the three dimensions of the universe in which it concretely expands - then you can establish the feedback loop that drives the primal chaos towards the flat connectedness of a true continuum state.

So a world gets born by starting with unbounded freedom. From every possibility of a point or locale there is the possibility of a momentum or curvature. You just get these two complementary things together in the pregeometry as a necessity. If there is a locale as spontaneous fluctuation of pure possibility or 1ns, then it come automatically with the equally phantom possibility of its motion or action. And given no restrictions or bounds as yet on that other possibility, it would have to be as unrestricted as possible - hence hyperbolic curvature, or Planck scale divergence.

But then given also we are presuming there must in fact also be interaction or constraint going on between these extremophile locales, these unbounded fluctuations (a reasonable conclusion as it must be the case as otherwise we could not be here to question its existence) then it only takes a little bit of interacting to provide a little more persistent for the fluctuations, the ruptures, to start to cool and start to line up in flatter fashion.

Given such an interaction - a state of 3ns - constraints would provide a generalised flattening force, while the vagueness with its unbounded curvature would provide the energy to be disposed of as a developing extent of spacetime. We start with a lump blob of energy - a wodge of fluctuations going off in disconnected directions. Then like a ball of pastry, it gets rolled flat and spread very thin. It tells the story of a Big Banf becoming a Heat Death via an asymptotic story of self-equilibrating cooling and expanding. At the Heat Death, the fluctations or local curvature is almost completely dissipated, leaving just a Euclidean actuality of a maximally cold, dark, even, and perfectly connected void.

So if we are to get deeply physical about the mathematical continuum, we have to wind the story back even pre-dimensionally or pre-geometry. Peirce's blackboard analogy talks of an infinity of flat dimensions. But even vaguer would be an infinity of hyperbolically curved fluctuations that lack all connection or communication, and so flatness can become part of their telos if flatness is also a latent possibility of that pre-geometric beginning.

And it must be because any curvature at all is already speaking to the otherness that would be flatness and connectedness instead.

Meanwhile, our current PM used to be a real climate change warrior - and now he's talking about 'clean coal' and mocking the Opposition for overselling the benefits of renewable. — Wayfarer

What does Australia makes its living from? Coal and minerals. Who owns the media. Coal billionaires like Gina Rhineheart. Who owns the politicians? The same.

Same in the US. Trump will be tolerated until the right laws have been passed that favour established big money interests. After that, people can impeach him if they want to.

As a first cut: If x is contextual, then it is not necessarily true that under all circumstances, x = x. — aletheist

Or x = not not-x is true. That employs the context to derive the specificity via a dichotomy.

Check out the Spencer-Brown's laws of form. Or Kaufmann's note on Peirce's sign of illation - http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Peirce.pdf

Would "contextuality" be a good descriptive term for this characteristic, as the second member of a trichotomy with vagueness and generality? What about "substance" to go along with matter and form? — aletheist

I don't think it is essential to arrive at one perfect word. Peirce called them one, two, and three precisely because the same basic triadic relation could have its many manifestations.

But if vagueness is the best term for 1ns, and generality the best for 3ns, then another term for 2ns (after hierarchy theory) would be specificity.

Now the issue is that you think that 2ns needs to be contradicted by (or there be a failure of distribution concerning) the law of identity. So somehow 2ns itself should mean the opposite of the individual, the specific, the determinate,

But the Peircean triad actually wants to give the particular its real place in the scheme of things. So we don't need to contradict identity itself to contradict the principle of identity.

I mean 2ns looks the most like the regular reductionist notion of the atomistically and mechanically determinate - in simply being Newtonian action and reaction.

That is why I said the contradiction lies in the genesis of specificity. Peirceanism says it is a contextual deal. The laws of thought say it is brutely tautological. So the opposition is there between the holism and atomism, but Peirceanism would still call 2ns "actuality" or one of its synonyms, like particular, local, substantial, specific, determinate, individual, etc. The difference is that what the laws of thought presume as the brute foundations - nominalistic identity - Peirceanism shows to be the emergent final product.

Positive psychology is not a panacea, if it was, everyone would literally be promoting it all the time. It's like the 19th century cure-all — schopenhauer1

Yeah, lets go for a proper 20th century cure like pharmaceuticals or ECT. Have a lobotomy while you're at it.

Should we gloss over the fact that there is no justification to keep institutions going? — schopenhauer1

That's the beauty of it. We can each do our own thing. You can be miserable and die, leaving behind nothing. I can live a life expecting a mix of the rough and the smooth, bring up kids of a similar mind.

At the end, we would both fulfil our wishes. You would find the ultimate exit door and I would perpetuate something of like mind. So what's there to complain about?

It's severely lacking in compassion and understanding. — darthbarracuda

How can that be so? Your life has to be a vale of tears or else your personal philosophy would be contradicted. I sometimes worry I'm not doing enough to confirm you in your pessimistic opinions.

So once more with feeling - suck it up.

It is peak cheap oil that is the economic issue. So the EROEI (energy return on energy invested). And cheap oil did peak. We are now in the era of stagnation to be followed by scramble.

Of course, renewables could come on stream faster than expected. But the world is doing a poor job in paving the way for a smooth transition. Hence Fortress America. Steve Bannon has been openly rubbing his hands about the inevitability of the destruction from which the US will arise great once again.

I said — Banno

Yeah. But anyone can wiki the set theoretic definition. Keep up.

Yes, Spinoza's concept of substance is contradictory to Aristotle's concept. Spinoza denies that there can be many finite substances and contends that there can be only one infinite substance. — John

Yep. The problem with Spinoza is that he was right about there having to be a "One", but wrong in conceiving of that basic materiality as a singular substance rather than as the vagueness of unbounded action. So it is material cause ... in its most insubstantial form. So action utterly lacking in form or purpose. An everythingness that is a singular being only because we call its fundamental disunity or lack of direction a single property or characteristic.

Vagueness is the canonical many. And when the question is asked of how many manys there are, the answer that comes back is "I am only counting the one".

But in what sense, then, is this distinctive of 2ns, in the same way that the inapplicability of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle are distinctive of vageness/1ns and generality/3ns, respectively? — aletheist

Vagueness and generality are defined as not being constrained in two of the ways that actual particulars are constrained. So materiality can be vague and not substantial. Form can be general and likewise not substantial.

Although given 3ns, these categorical distinctions are themselves all just aspects of the single triadic, irreducibly complex, sign relation. So that is why forms or universals can be real but not actual. And more unusually, the same is being said of the material principle. Materiality (as the vagueness of pure tychic spontaneity) is also a real potential, but not actually substantial 2ns (as it lacks yet the regularisation of habitual form or 3ns).

You see here that I go back and forth between hylomorphism and semiotics as of course the two are essentially the same metaphysical scheme with semiotics doing the better job of explaining the "how" by its foregrounding the mechanical role played by the sign relation in producing a world of suitably "deadened" substance.

Anyway 2ns would stand in relation to the law of identity as this same kind of protest - I am not constrained by that constraint which is said to be required to produce the brutely particular.

So 2ns instead talks about the deeper process that produces the brute particular. It points to the materiality and the formality, the vagueness and the generality, that have to be in interaction to produce actual substantial events, or differences that make a difference. 2ns treats actuality as what you get in the limit (with full 3ns). So actuality does apply to 2ns ... in the limit. But then 2ns is thus not actuality as brutely conceived by the law of identity. It is completely contextual once you step back to see the full 3ns scheme of things.

And this becomes more acceptable if we choose our intuition pumps more carefully and stop imagining reality in already presumptively Newtonian terms - like billiard balls rattling about on green baize.

What happens when two clouds collide? Where does any one cloud stop and start? What is the definite shape of any cloud? What is the physical logic of cloudy objects?

Clouds surely have actuality - we talk about them enough. But really, the law of identity fails to apply in a big way. And we can now specify the nature of that failure in the language of fractal maths. The contextuality of identity stands completely exposed these days.

I mean even Cantor was on the right track without really understanding it.

Have you checked - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_set

Here is an analogy. You can simply talk about a disease in terms of all the chemistry and mechanics involved (dynamic or mechanical or other), and you can talk about disease in terms of the individual experience of the disease. — schopenhauer1

Hence positive psychology. Once you realise that it is all about contextual framing, then the obvious next step is to take charge of your own psychosocial framing. You stop belly aching about the life that has mechanically been forced upon you and take charge of creating a life as you want it.

Of course then if you think you can have a life of untroubled bliss, you don't understand the point of life at all. So there is no point making romantic transcendence your goal. The nature of nature is pragmatic. Suck it up. It ain't so bad once you do achieve that kind of harmonious flow.

What remains unclear to me is what it means to say that the principle of identity does not apply to something. Zalamea helpfully formalizes the principles of vagueness and generality on page 21 of his paper; he describes them as failures of distribution of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, respectively. Is there an analogous way to formalize the principle of identity and/or its failure, which would show what you have in mind here? — aletheist

So 2ns is dyadic reaction. Actuality is being defined in terms of a difference that makes a difference. This is quite in contrast to a tautology where the actual is simply a difference. It is not about what the world can see and remember as a concrete happening - a unique event that produce some further change. It is simply presuming the existence of some thing as that which is "the same as itself" - absolutely secure in its difference from other things without further determination. Nothing has to be actually shown or remembered by way of the demonstration of some reaction.

Thus it is not hard to see secondness contradicting identity in a big way. Actuality is about some relative change that is definite due to a context. A thing must be reacting to at least one other thing.

And then when does such an interaction ever exhaust all properties. If I bump into a car in the pitch dark, I have some idea perhaps of an encounter with something metal and solid. But is it a Porsche or a Fiat. Might it just be a lamppost?

So identity is only approached in the limit by the dyad of actual interaction. And Newtonianism said at the end of the day, the limit itself dissolved into the purely relative. In space, am I drifting away from the rocket, or is the rocket moving away from me? The mechanics of the situation are fundamentally reversible or symmetric. We can't any longer use local differences as the guide to what is actually the case. The identity of individuals can't be arrived via the exhaustion of their observables, even if it can be approached with arbitrary closeness in principle.

So 2ns switches things in flipping it so that actuality is not real in the sense of a limit state having been concretely achieved - the usual classical notion of identity. Instead a limit is a limit - the place that "exists" in the apophatic sense of never actually being arrived at. So 2ns is substantiality approaching its exhaustive limit, not substantiality in and of itself, nothing further needing securing.

Only substance is, according to Spinoza, conceived through itself. Modes are conceived through their relations to other modes and, ultimately, through substance. So existence is of the essence of substance, but existence is not of the essence of modes. — John

This would be what Peirce's secondness challenges. Uniqueness would still be defined relatively. Inidividuation or identity is a difference that makes a difference. So - following Aristotle - the substantial is has some particular matter and some particular form. That is, it stands in relative contrast to the absolutely vague and the absolutely general.

This secondness or substantiality then shows itself in the sharp possibility of a reaction. One thing can react with definiteness to another thing. We have the dyad of some relation. We have a difference that is distinctive as part of a context and so can go on to be remembered as changing its developing history. We have the uniqueness of some difference that actually made a difference to the whole.

In the OP, I suggest that institutions may be self-perpetuating and the individuals are simply instruments for the perpetuation of the institutions. They become a maintenance crew, but why the maintenance crew has to keep maintaining in the first place, is never really answered, especially in light of the possible harms on the maintenance crew. — schopenhauer1

Well I've already explained the reason why this is naturally logical. The whole arises from the parts it shapes. So of course the parts would have to feel aligned with the purpose of that which is their global cause. Yet constraints are about the limitation of the accidental. So the parts can only be approximately aligned. Some degree of variety or non-alignment is to be expected. A system could break down if its parts are too roughly formed and they begin to fail to reconstruct the context of constraints that are meant to be forming them correctly.

So to use your jargon, as long as overall the maintenance crew is happy in the world they are constructing, the system will self-perpetuate. And also harms are always possible as the accidental or the various can only be limited, not eliminated.

Another systems point is that parts are meant to have critical instabilty. The best parts are those that are the most perfectly poised in a conflicted manner - balanced at the point of going in completely opposite directions. This is what allows it to be the case that top down constraints can make the parts easily switchable - turned on or off in various directions.

So the usual presumption is that parts must have stability for the whole to function. But this is not natural at all. It is mechanical and not organic.

Check out humans, and you can see this is the case. Biologicallly we are evolved to be poised between dramatically different states of mind. Fight or flight. Anxious or calm. Active or passive. Dominant or submissive. Empathetic or cold. A lot of what you call harms is simply a requirement for this kind of quick switching between sharply different responses to circumstances. We are made to be unstable because that is the source of a system's power. A slight touch on the controls is all it takes to turn on a dime.

So yes, if you think about this philosophically, it may seem weird. But only because you are framing the situation mechanically and not organically. You are treating humanity like a mindless maintenance crew perpetuating some giant machine that exists for no apparent purpose.

But nature is organic, not mechanical. You are applying a model of things that has the fundamental flaws I've outlined often enough.

An exemplar is simply an ideal instance. The general particular. It is the essential example in having the least that is accidental about it, and so the most that reflects necessity.

If we were illustrating a kid's reader to give the ideal notion of a cat, it wouldn't be three legged or suffering other accidents of fate.

And more sophisticated notions of metaphysics would view the general and the particular as being a matter of constraints and freedoms.

Now it becomes more clear that the exemplary is defined by a limit on the accidental. Constraints don't have to "generate the essential". They only need to limit the accidents or degrees of freedom in sufficient fashion (and constraints always embody some purpose, hence sufficiency follows directly from that satisfaction).

So we wind up with exemplars as a least action or symmetry breaking principle. They illustrate the shortest distance to the thing in question because there are the least accidental details encountered along the way.

So you didn't realise that tautologies exclude semantics so are no use when it comes to making actual sense?

why do individual humans care about the species' survival — schopenhauer1

They might say that they do, but the majority certainly don't act as they do.

Why should the human not care that the institution perpetuates individual suffering any more than they should ignore their own harm to keep the institutions going? You do not seem to have a justification. — schopenhauer1

Given you are arguing that there is a general contract as well as these subcontracts, there is no reason individuals couldn't find society generally ok but problematic in certain regards.

Of course if you now deny your own thesis...

I note you never got around to talking about the fate of the point but instead wandered off to talk about something else.

However, in the West at least, we have the notion of individualism and being our own person. — schopenhauer1

Yes. So this subcontracted notion has evolved because it works and we naturally seek to perpetuate it - even if it doesn't always make us happy.

But evolving to challenge elements of the subcontract - a conscious creation of variety that drives human cultural complexification - is not the same as challenging the contract at the general level. That would be unnatural and maladaptive.

I'm guess that you were baffled by the OP's talk of both a general social contract and a variety of more particular sub-contracts.

Don't bother answering. I've already lost interest in your failed attempt at pedantry.

So you agree with me. Cool.

But an individual doesn't agree with many institutions from his society. Take me for example. There's many institutions, cultural trends, etc. which are very dominant, and yet I don't agree with, and I don't want to see perpetuated. — Agustino

And so you demonstrate how entrenched an intolerance for difference can be. You really think yours should be the only institution handing out the subcontracts. You believe deeply in genericity. It just troubles you that your version has so little general hold.

how is it that the individual must perpetuate the agenda of the institutions by having more people that will perpetuate the institutions? — schopenhauer1

But if the institutions do shape the individual, then why wouldn't the individual - in at least a general way - not want that to continue? In wanting that from the institution, the individual is simply saying, if we are to have more, let them be like me. What would or could possess the individual to have a different desire.

Even nihilism and anti natalism are subcontracts or local institutions. They shape mindsets. And those individuals - yourself for instance - certainly seem to want to create more of just the same mind. So why do you perpetuate that agenda? Don't you find it logical as it ensures the longevity of your particular institution and increases thus the likelihood of ever more of you?

(Of course if this subcontract involves a quick suicide or a conscious failure to breed, then it will soon be a forgotten trope - defined by its production of the generically incapable.)

If you say that evolution has created humans that have minds that want to promote survival through a certain cultural means, then this is simply restating the idea that institutions are perpetuated, you are just throwing in the word survival which is essentially the same thing at the species level, but not addressing the fact that it is still begging-the-question as to why keep the institutions going. — schopenhauer1

It's not question begging. It is logical for the individual to want more of much the same. Then evolution makes sure that sameness is tracking whatever actually works.

Does that make any more sense? — aletheist

Well my view is that the laws of thought are designed to make the world safe for predicate logic - reasoning about the concretely particular or actually individuated. So the three laws combined - or rather three constraints - secure this desirable form of reasoning in a suitable strait-jacket.

If x is x, and x is not not-x, and x is either x or not-x, then that seems to remove all wiggle room for constructing a logical tale founded in brute atomistic particulars.

So it was unconscious semiotics that produced the laws of thought. Their triadicity was no accident as indeterminism of three kinds had to be sealed off.

Then Peircean semiotics tells the inverse story. Instead of determinate actuality or identity being foundational - the first law of the three - it becomes instead the final outcome secured via the other two.

Again, this is somewhat of a departure from conventional Peirceanism. I employ the logic of dichotomies (as it is understood from the vantage of hierarchy theory) where definite actuality or 2ns is emergent from the interaction of constraints and free or vague potential. So 2ns comes last in a sense (though this is no contradiction of Peirceanism, just making something further explicit).

Anyway, the principle of identity becomes the last thing to be secured. As I described it earlier, the habit of 3ns must arise in a way that knocks all the sharp corners off the variety that is 2ns, reducing it to the law-bound regularity that limits every reactive dyad to being as boringly repetitive and mechanical as possible. So 2ns secured is 2ns once lively spontaneity now turned dully persistent. Or effete matterial habit.

So that would be why Peircean 2ns is not obedient to the principle of identity. At least on its first appearance (before it gets tamed by 3ns). In the beginning, any damn reaction is possible. There is no stable identity in the sense that you don't even have things which could be assured of being the same as their previous selves if ever they were to reappear again. 2ns in its purity is maximally non-identical. But once incorporated into 3ns, it gets tamed. It becomes as identical or self-repeating as possible.

So it goes beyond simply "not applying". It cannot apply because it comes from a contradicting direction of thought. It is holism contradicting reductionism.

The logic of the particular starts with particularity being treated as already secured. Peircean semiosis stands in exact contrast saying that is precisely what has to be secured by way of completed 3ns. Only then is 2ns properly constrained to have reliable identity.

Do I need to rebuke him to demonstrate my impartiality? — aletheist

Why not just do much less rebuking all round and focus on dealing with the substance of any post.

How would you formulate the principle of identity such that it would not apply to the actual, because nothing that exists is determinate with respect to every predicate? Does it apply to 1ns and 3ns, such that its inapplicability is a distinguishing feature of 2ns as you seem to be suggesting? — aletheist

What are you talking about.

Generality is defined by its contradiction of LEM. Vagueness is defined by its contradiction of PNC. So it would be neat if actuality or 2ns were contradicted by (thus apophatically derivable from) the remaining law of thought.

So it is not the job of 2ns to make the principle of identity true. Instead, it is how identity can be derived as a limit on the actuality of 2ns in line with the vagueness of 1ns and the generality of 3ns that would be of interest.

I was just trying to moderate a dispute between two of my favorite PF participants. — aletheist

Where is the dispute as such? I expected fishfry to tell me where I was wrong about category theory vs semiotics in his own words, not assign me further homework and file a further essay for his delectation.

He has now told me to fuck off. And you seem to think he is right to do so. Champion.

Ah, good point. Where Peirce said what I said, what you said, or both? — aletheist

I'm not aware that Peirce ever made this point about identity. And I'm not even sure that was the point you intended. But it is the point that now leaps out at me as a very neat extension of the Peicean line of thought. If it is unclaimed, one might even write a paper about it.

everything actual is indeterminate to some degree — aletheist

Yes. And so does that now suitably define 2ns or actuality as that to which the principle of identity does not apply? (And can you find the quote where Peirce said that?)

Sorry to repeat myself, but would you mind clarifying exactly what you mean by "analytic" and "synthetic" in this context — aletheist

Reductionist vs holistic, causally closed vs causally open, externalist and transcendent vs internalist and immanent, etc, etc.

I see nothing insulting about pointing out a discrepancy between what you wrote here and what is claimed in a paper that you recommended. — aletheist

Sigh. It was the failure to reply in kind. I made substantial points I believe. It is then tiresome to be told to go read what the paper says rather than have those points replied to.

Have I ever attacked you personally, in this thread or elsewhere? — aletheist

Yep. You are doing that right now too.

...it will just be the two of us trading thoughts about our favorite philosopher. I was hoping for much more than that... — aletheist

Oh what a disaster. And so you would rather chase me off now. Hilarious.

Then you are the one who responded with the first insult, alleging that he does not understand category theory. — aletheist

Well the facts are I gave a lengthy explanation of how I see the connection between category theory and semiotics, then fishfry came back with no other answer but "Zalamea appears to contradict you".

I find that to be the first insult here. I gave a full answer and I get back no useful reply.

And yes, I in fact avoided answering on the category theory point initially because I thought I might spare fishfry's blushes. His enthusiasm for Zalamea seemed hyperbolic and his thumbnail account of category theory quite naive.

As I say, I don't claim to be expert on category theory. I've given it a good try and for me it just doesn't compute. I get its general sense I think, but I end up feeling that it is in the end pretty sterile and useless - for the purposes of generalised metaphysics.

If you or fishfry want to enlighten me otherwise, be my guest. But don't keep attacking me personally instead of addressing the actual ideas I have attempted to put out there. I've no issue with those being kicked as hard as you like.

Peirce usually distinguished vagueness (1ns) from generality (3ns). "Perhaps a more scientific pair of definitions would be that anything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it." — aletheist

Yep. I cite that brilliant insight most days. And yet where does the principle of identity sit as actual individuation if vagueness and generality are the apophatic definition of the PNC and the LEM?

Peirce starts the discussion. It remains to be concluded.

That is not how I understand it, unless by "constrained possibility" you mean the actually possible as opposed to the logically possible. — aletheist

I don't think so. The actually possible is the counterfactually possible and so the logically possible.

Perhaps what you find confusing here is that I am striving to wed all this to actual physics (hence pansemiosis). So the missing factor is materiality or energetic action. The mathematical/logical view is all about form or structure - constraints in an abstract Platonic sense. And so that leaves out the material principle that ultimately must "breathe fire into the equations".

So physics too tends to leave actual materiality swinging in the wind of its formal endeavours. One finds the animating principle of a "material field" having to be inserted into the "theories of everything" by hand in an ad hoc way.

It is a really big and basic problem. Physics just gets too used to talking glibly of degrees of freedom (like mathematicians talk of points on a line) without having an account of their developmental history (and thus developmental mechanism).

So that is why I am focused on the two senses in which "pure possibility" get routinely confused in the history of metaphysics. And I don't think Peirce sorts it out in fully transparent fashion - even if he did get it and was trying to articulate that.

Now you are right, I'm just trying to learn what this means. But your unwillingness to explain anything of your jargon-filled posts says something about you.

Is it time for me to say fuck you to you again? I've had enough. Fuck you. — fishfry

What was I saying about instability?

I don't claim special expertise in category theory. But I think I know enough to know from your description that you know even less.

So I tried to explain my own point of view. I offered you the chance to rebut that from your current close reading of Zalamea. At which point - and I can't say I'm surprised - you explode in anger because you are not in the position to do so.

But never mind.

I guess you disagree with Zalamea about this? If so, why? — aletheist

I just said why. If fishfry thinks I was wrong, then I am genuinely interested to know on what grounds.

I hardly have a settled view here. And I don't have time right at the moment to re-read Zalamea more closely on this particular point. But I do welcome further discussion ... and not just nitpicking in place of honest rebuttal.

Is it? Like when I say that category theory might recover the stablised image of the synthetic in the limit?

It seems you don't understand either category theory (at a philosophical level) or semiosis and are just seeking to nitpick with contradictory sounding quotes.

If you want to explain to me how the synthetic continuum is in fact recovered fully by category theory, I would be very grateful. But can you do that?

Peirce acknowledged this - as soon as we talk or even think about a color or other quality, it is no longer 1ns in itself. — aletheist

You've been reacting to the word "brute" and missing the reason I applied it.

There is still this tension when trying to look back at talk of freedom, indeterminism, instability, or whatever, from the vantage point of 3ns.

Possibility comes in two varieties - 1ns and 2ns. Firstness is unconstrained possibility and secondness is constrained possibility. So 1ns is more like the notion of pure potential, and 2ns more like the ordinary notion of statistical probabilty (or even a propensity).

So while Peirce may have truly understood vagueness (and I'm not so sure that he did for some particular reasons), his routinely quoted descriptions of it are too much already bounded and precise. If you mention the quality of red, you are already making people think of other alternative colour qualities like purple or green. So there is a fundamental imprecision in his attempts to talk about firstness that then ought to motivate us to attempt to clarify the best way to talk about something which is admittedly also the ultimately ineffable.

Others have noted this too.

Firstness is more or less indeterminate or determinate, not more or less vague or precise; only with Peirce's category of Thirdness can we speak of vagueness versus precision (and then there's also vagueness versus generality).

http://www.paulburgess.org/triadic.html

So that is why - rather paradoxically it might seem - I approach the modelling of vagueness by treating it as a state of perfect symmetry. Meaning in turn, an unbounded chaos of fluctuations that is the purest possible form of "differences making no difference" - that being the dynamical and teleological definition of a symmetry.

Ie: If we have to resort to concrete talk any time we speak about the indefinite, well let's make that bug a feature. Let's just be completely concrete - as in calling the wildest chaos the most unblemished symmetry.

And the reason for making that backward leap into deepest thirdness is so that firstness can become maximally mathematically tractable. We can apply the good stuff of symmetry and symmetry breaking theory to actually build scientific theories and go out and measure the world.

So I didn't talk about this tension over the definition of the idea of "possibility" lightly. I actually don't believe Peirce finished the job. He did not leave us with a mathematical model of vagueness, even if he was pointing in all the right directions.

I wanted to mention that at one point Zalamea basically says that Peirce is doing category theory, or category theory is Peircean. — fishfry

I don't really see that myself as category theory seeks a closed structure preserving relation whereas semiosis is open ended both in being grounded in spontaneity and hierarchically elaborative. The spirit seems quite different as even though Peirce appears to be proposing rigid categories (and indeed goes overboard in turning his trichotomy into a hierarchy of 66 classes of sign), essentially the whole structure is quite fluid and approximate - more always a process than a structure as such.

So category theory seeks an analytic foundations whereas semiosis seeks a synthetic one. One is about the tight circle of a conservation principle where you can move about among different versions of the same thing without information being lost (the essential structure always preserved), while the other is an open story about how information actually gets created ... from "nothing".

They may still relate. But probably as Peirce telling the developmental tale of how any exact structure can come to be, and then category theory as a tale of that developed general structure.

So perhaps a connection. But coming at it from quite different metaphysical directions. So foundationally different as projects.

I have to say that I have a somewhat negative view of category theory because it seems to add so little to the practice of science. In particular, two rather brilliant people - Robert Rosen in mathematical biology and John Baez in mathematical physics - have tried to apply it in earnest to real world modelling (life itself, and particle physics). Yet the results feel stilted. Nothing very fruitful was achieved.

By contrast, semiosis just slots straight into the natural sciences. It makes instant sense.

Category theory is dyadic and associative - which is not wrong but, to me, the flattened mechanical view of reality. It is structure frozen out of the developmental processes from which - in nature - it must instead emerge as a limit.

Then semiosis is the three dimensional and dynamical view of reality - organic in that it captures the further axis which speaks to a fundamental instability of nature, and hence the need for emergent development of regulating structure.

The switch from a presumption of foundational stability to foundational instability is something I want to emphasise. That is the Heraclitean shift in thought. Regularity has to emerge to stabilise things. And yet regularity still needs vague or unstable foundations. The world can't be actually frozen in time.

And this connects back to models of the continuum. The mathematician wants to have a number line that can be cut - and the cut is stable. The number line is a passive entity that simply accepts any mark we try to make. It is a-causal - in exactly the same mechanical fashion that Newton imagined the atomism of masses free to do their causal thing within the passive backdrop of an a-causal void.

But Peirceanism would say the opposite. The number line - like the quantum vacuum - is alive with a zero point energy. It sizzles and crackles with possibility. On the finest scale, it becomes impossible to work with due to its fundamental instability.

And regular maths seems to understand that unconsciously. That is why it approaches the number line with a system of constraints. As Zalamea describes, the strategy to approach the reals is via the imposition of a succession of distinctions - the operations of difference, proportion and then finally (in some last gasp desperation) the waving hand of future convergence.

So maths tames the number line by a series of constraining steps. It minimises its indeterminism or dynamism, and looks up feeling relieved. Its world is now safe to get on with arithmetic.

But the Peircean revolution is about seeing this for what it really is. Maths just wants to shrink instability out of sight. Peirce says no. Let's turn our metaphysics around so that it becomes an account of this whole thing - the instability that is fundamental and the semiotic machinery that arises to tame it. Maths itself needs to be understood as a semiotic exercise.

So that would be where semiotics stands in regards to category theory. It is the bigger view that explains why mathematicians might strive to extract some rigid final frozen closed sense of essential mathematical structure from the wildly tossing seas of pure and unbounded possibility.

I would note the interesting contrast with fundamental physics where the crisis is instead quantum instability. In seeking a solid atomistic foundation, at a certain ultimate Planck scale, suddenly everything went as pear-shaped as could be imagined. Reality became just fundamentally weird and impossible.

But that is too much hyperventilation in the other direction. Just looking around we can see the fact that existence itself is thoroughly tamed quantum indeterminacy. The Universe as it is (especially now that it is so close to its heat death) is classical to a very high degree. So all that quantum weirdness is in fact pretty much completely collapsed in practice. Instability has been constrained by its own emergent classical limit (its own sum over possibility).

So where maths is too cosy in believing in its classicality, physics is too hung up on its discovery of basic instability. Both have gone overboard in complementary directions.

Semiosis is then the metaphysics that stands in the middle and can relate the determinate to the indeterminate in logical fashion. Especally as pansemiosis - the nascent field of dissipative structure theory - it is the quantum interpretation that finally makes sense.

Hot damn! ;)

Again, Peirce did not use "bruteness" to refer to 1ns, only 2ns. — aletheist

Yes, I realise. But my point was that he actually talks about 1ns in misleadingly brute terms. For instance when he makes the analogy with being infused with the pure experience of red. The very idea of a psychological quality is already too substantial sounding to my ear. Too material and passive.

So you already dismiss the alternative that the social relations are the source of the personal individuation? The capable individual is what society in fact has in mind?

From Googling around I think being triadic is what a mathematician would call ternary — fishfry

Not really. Although ternary logic is something like it in fleshing out the strict counterfactuality of 0/1 binary code by introducing a middle ground indeterminate value - the possibility to return a value basically saying "um, not too sure either way".

So it is about arity, which ought to be familiar as a concept. But I could have as well said trichotomic or triune as triadic. It is the threeness that is the distinction that matters.

So really triadic just means not dyadic. Instead of two things in relation, we are talking about the higher dimensionality of three things all relating. And that is irreducibly complex as each thing could be changing the other thing that is trying to change the third thing which was changing the first thing.

In other words, we are dealing with the instability that makes the three body problem or the Konigsberg bridge problem so difficult to compute. One can't caculate directly as none of the values in a complex relation are standing still. Associativity does not apply. Thus you have to employ a holistic constraints satisfaction strategy. You approach the limit of a solution by perturbation. Jiggle the thing until it seems to have settled into its lowest energy or least action state.

I'm guessing this is all familiar maths and so demonstrates what a vast difference it makes to go from the two dimensional interactions to a metaphysics which begins with the inherent dynamical instability of being a relation in three dimensions hoping to find some eventually settled equilibrium balance.

If you get that, then triadic then points towards the mathematical notion of a hierarchy. The best way to settle a complex relation into a stable configuration is hierarchical order. That is the three canonical levels of a global bound, a local bound, and then the bit inbetween that is their interaction.

So reverting to the classical jargon, necessity interacting with possibility gives you actuality. Or constraints, by suppressing chaos, give you definiteness.

So two key points there. Threeness is about irreducible dynamism and thus intractable complexity. Computation in the normal sense - the one dependent on associativity - instantly collapses and other constraints-based or peturbative techniques must be employed.

Then threeness is the link across to hierarchy theory - reality with scale symmetry. Now Peirce himself was not strictly a hierarchy theorist. But once you have studied hierarchy theory, then immediately you can see how Peirce was talking about the same thing from another angle.

And that is indeed how I entered this story - from hierarchy theory as very important to theoretical biology at a time when the connection to Peircean semiotics was being made about 15 years ago.